House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa has stated that the IRS illegally handed over taxpayer data to the Justice Department for the purpose of possibly taking legal action against taxpayers.

In a Monday letter to the IRS, Issa said Justice told his committee on June 2 that it received this information from the IRS back in 2010. But while Justice first said the 21 disks of data only contained public information on tax-exempt organizations, Justice then said they did appear to contain confidential information.

“[T]his revelation likely means that the IRS — including possibly Lois Lerner — violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department in 2010,” Issa wrote.

“This revelation that the IRS sent 1.1 million pages of nonprofit tax-return data — including confidential taxpayer information — to the FBI confirms suspicions that the IRS worked with the Justice Department to facilitate the potential investigation of nonprofit groups engaged in lawful political speech,” Issa wrote.

“At the very least, this information suggests that the IRS considered the political speech activities of nonprofits to be worthy of investigation by federal law-enforcement officials,” he added. “The IRS apparently considered political speech by nonprofit groups to be so troublesome that it illegally assisted federal law-enforcement officials in assembling a massive database of the lawful political speech of thousands of American citizens, weeks before the 2010 midterm elections, using confidential taxpayer information.”

This is simply outrageous. Freedom of speech is a God-given right that is so critical to liberty that the Founding Fathers thought it necessary to protect it in the First Amendment of the Constitution. The federal government has no right or authority to silence the opinion of those who dare to speak out against their agenda.